Suzanne Weiss has been writing about the arts for the past 35 years. Formerly Arts Editor for the papers of Pioneer Press in the northern Chicago suburban area, her work also has appeared in Stagebill and Crain’s Chicago Business, among other publications. Since moving to the Bay Area she has reviewed theater, opera, dance and the occasional film for the San Mateo Times, “J” and is a regular contributor to culturevulture. She is the author of “Glencoe, Queen of Suburbs.”
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Writes in: Art & Architecture, Dance, Etc, Music, Television, and Theater.
TheaterSan Francisco,
Someone with nothing better to do once counted how many times the word “nothing” appears in Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” Having better things to do I have forgotten the total but it was a lot. All stemming from the protagonist’s early ...
MusicSan Francisco,
I must confess I have always preferred my horror on an intimate scale. That means a television set rather than a multiplex and, most particularly, Stephen Sondheim’s macabre masterwork, “Sweeney Todd,” as a chamber opera, rather than a Broadway musical. ...
TheaterSan Francisco,
Once upon a time there was a little girl with a great big imagination. Her parents were unloving and aloof and her only friend, Fluffy the Goldfish, was dumped unceremoniously into the Seine. Very much alone, Amélie turned inward to ...
TheaterSan Francisco,
The Lyons sure can roar! At each other, at perfect strangers and, after a couple of hours of Nicky Silver’s dark comedy, newly opened at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre, it seems at the audience as well.
The family Lyons ...
TheaterSan Francisco,
With enough swash and buckle and bathroom humor to satisfy any kid and lots of double entendre and witty word-play for the grownups, Peter Pan and his crew flew back in town with a little something for everyone.
Silicon ...
TheaterSan Francisco,
Molly Ivins deserves better. “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins,” Kathleen Turner’s one-person show (except for a copy boy, Michael Barrett Austin, who silently wanders in and out, handing her dispatches from the AP wire machine that ...
TheaterSan Francisco,
Don’t ask me what it means. The inspired nonsense that comes out of the fertile brain of Robert Wilson is meaningless, yet fraught with meaning — barely comprehensible but hugely entertaining — absurdism at its finest. There’s a story there ...
MusicSan Francisco,
Some things never go out of style: basic black, young love, “La Bohème.” Reputed to be the most often performed opera in the canon, Puccini’s tale of the consumptive seamstress, the impoverished poet and their high-spirited, if equally penniless, friends ...
MusicSan Francisco,
The Curlew River runs fast among the fens, dividing East from West, person from person. So goes the description in Benjamin Britten’s stirring little opera, “Curlew River.” Part medieval mystery play, part Noh drama (the libretto, by William Plomer, was ...
MusicSan Francisco,
Instead of a fairy godmother, we have a wise old tutor and the glass slippers are now a pair of diamond bracelets. Aside from that, everything is as usual — only funnier — in Rossini’s operatic version of the timeless ...
